Problem Management works in a reactive and proactive manner. Reactive to support incident management’s goal of restoring service as quickly as possible. Proactive in a continual improvement manner to help the organization improve and deliver better value to the business and to the customers. Problem management helps stop incidents from reoccurring.

Problem management helps industrialize the back-end of IT. This process should work in a collaborative coordinated fashion to find errors in IT with other specialized functions in the organization, such as application management, technical management, and operations management. There should be a process owner and a process manager to help with the success of these processes.

The process owner should work with other process owners, such as incident management and change management process owners, in order to design the process while taking into consideration data exchanges between the processes for communication efficiency. The process owner should also do a number of other activities to support the process, such create the process policy for problem management and obtain executive sign off. The policy should articulate roles and responsibilities for the process and related to the process.

The process manager should coordinate resources and capabilities for execution of the process. This requires at a minimum project management capabilities, as well as ITIL® capabilities, for successful execution of the process. The process manager depending on workload may also want a problem management analyst to assist with the following:

• Creation of problem record related to one or more incidents
• Creation of problem record related to proactive concerns
• Creation of request for change (RFC) to fix error in IT related to problems
• Management of problem knowledge on behave of knowledge management
• Management of workarounds and IT errors

Problem management is an important process to help IT become more proactive and deliver better service. Many organizations try to do problem management within the incident management process. When this happens usually incidents keep reoccurring, user satisfaction drops, IT reputation gets worst, and a number of other things happen that do not support success in this area.